San Antonio SSO Meeting

The Society of Surgical Oncology Meeting in San Antonio, 01-06MARCH2011
Dr. Tate is pictured in the photograph trying to remember the Alamo. We remembered it for several minutes, then paused to enjoy a cigar while sitting on park benches just across from the Alamo. We inquired of the status of PeeWee’s bicycle in the basement of the Alamo and learned that the Alamo actually has two small basements, large enough to hold a bicycle. You can’t believe everything that you see in the movies. The meetings were long and arduous, but we were able to get 34 CME credits for this venture. The conference literally went from dawn until dusk, and so we did not have a lot of time to spend reflecting on the Alamo, but we did get around a little bit. The conference was at the large conference facility just next to the river walk. We’d go down to the river to eat our lunch.


You can see that we were dressed up to the hilt. This is sort of a snobby conference, as most surgical meetings usually occur in more casual attire. The pathologists were having their meeting next door to us, where I was able to encounter one of the Puyallup pathologists. Notice his more casual attire.

We were able to see the San Antonio imitation of the Seattle Space Needle.

It was one of the better conferences that I’ve gone to as of late. Most notably, it was announced that we must stop doing so many axillary dissections and that while it would have been malpractice a week before to not complete an axillary dissection when the sentinel lymph node was grossly positive, we are now committing malpractice to do the same. The Surgical Oncology gods have spoken and we must obey. NCCN guidelines will be slow to correct the new change in practice recommendations, but we will be patient. So, I return to Puyallup full of vim and vigor and will be plagiarizing one of the talks I heard in presenting to the other surgeons and oncology doctors the new revelations from the randomized trials.
p.s. too much academia becomes hard to endure…